How to listen so our kids will speak

The children’s rights initiative launched by the European Commission in Strasbourg this week proposes a White Paper at the end of next year, or possibly in 2008. Several non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Save the Children and World Vision, have seized on this to demand that the Commission’s plan for a ‘children’s rights forum’ be co-ordinated by a European commissioner.

In the light of horrendous statistics on child abuse (globally 40 million under the age of 12 suffer from abuse, neglect, and require health and social care), child trafficking, and the recent murders of two young girls in Belgium, the demand seems reasonable. Is it the right way forward?

Moving children up the agenda is not a bad idea, though hardly a new one. Under the French presidency, the member states established A Permanent Childhood and adolescence intergovernmental group, L’Europe de l’Enfance. Prior to that, the Amsterdam treaty provided an impetus inter alia to acknowledge children as victims.

Appointing a Commissioner to this area does imply Europe means business on protecting children. But beyond making symbolic gestures, it is doubtful whether the underlying concept of a strategy based on consulting children makes sense. How, for instance, are they to be consulted? And is it really a sensible, let alone tested, means of developing policy?

Oscar Wilde wisely observed that “every problem has a solution unless you haven’t analysed the problem correctly”. The uncomfortable, unfashionable truth is that all the problems of children are ultimately about parenting. It is parents who should be held responsible for protecting, nurturing, guiding and overseeing the education of their young.

Experience and common sense therefore suggest that what is really needed is a commissioner for family welfare and values.

As for consultation, I can only speak from experience at Generation Europe; we are in direct contact with more than one million young people in 27 European countries through the Europa diary project and youth opinion surveys. Inviting children to “participate in decisions that concern them via a children’s forum”, as suggested by various Brussels-based NGOs, would, based on our experience, be virtually impossible to implement.

If it is to be pan-European, such a forum is likely to be a nightmare in terms of resources and logistics. Would it be set up on the internet, accessible at home or in the classroom? How would a representative sample across all walks of life and strata of society be reached? Would parents be consulted on their rights to overview and control input? And crucially, would the Commission be accused of interfering in territories which are the responsibility of national authorities and find itself hopelessly hamstrung?

Broadcasters, publishers and the private sector all wish to reach this elusive target of tomorrow’s decision-makers who will work, vote and consume in the coming years.

But most young people will only voice their views if there is an incentive (ie they can quantify the direct benefits to “me, myself and I”) or if they are forced to do so. In this they are remarkably similar to adults.

They have the joint means to create a communication platform for young people (eventually in collaboration with NGOs – why not?), to make it truly visible a la MTV, and to play a corporate socially responsible role in doing so.

Perhaps the national authorities and the European institutions, both rather bereft of ideas just now about how to get through to people, should try working together with the private sector, and with the media, on this common denominator interest: Young People.

With genuine will behind it, it might just escape being consigned to Europe’s overflowing cupboard of grandiloquent initiatives and actually achieve something.

Catie Thorburn is president of Generation Europe, a Brussels-based organisation linking 25 EU member states and most candidate countries. Websites: www.generation-europe.org and www.generation-europe.eu.com